Rani, Immortal
by aragonite
Summary: I've been wanting to do a Rani vs. Two fic a LONG time, and with Kate O'Mara's passing, I thought this is the best I could do…she was such a wonderful actress!
1. Chapter 1

**Rani, Immortal**

_I've been wanting to do a Rani vs. Two fic a LONG time, and with Kate O'Mara's passing, I thought this is the best I could do…she was such a wonderful actress!_

_Characters: The Rani, Second Doctor, mentions of Serena. The Brigadier. Barb and reference to THE DALEK INVASION OF EARTH and THE NAMELESS CITY (prose)_

_Timeline: After WORLD GAME (prose), and deep within the years of Season 6B. Events happen after Time and the Rani; Mark of the Rani. Just before THE POWERS OF TWO fanfic I have on fflnet where Two rescues The Brigadier from The Year That Never Was._

_Here Two is picking up the pieces for the CIA again, between visits to Jamie and Zoe and Victoria._

* * *

She was one of the more ghoulish memories of his past. He couldn't think of her without thinking of the painful memories that coincided with knowing her: the growing rift between himself and the others in the Deca.

His slow-moving alienation between himself and his own people.

He still didn't understand how Gallifrey could hold the likes of him as a monster on par with her evil. He wasn't evil; he was trying to _help_ people—all people, not just his own. Gallifrey really had enough of her own champions. Why not champion for one of the underdogs once in a while? Wasn't that important?

The answer was no; never. Little people for little lives.

The Doctor sighed. His head still hurt but he moved slowly, and piece by piece he found what he needed in his bulging pockets.

Matches.

A two-ounce bottle of ethylene.

A Galactic Missile.

An empty brown paper wrap, from a sweets shop on his last trip to Earth.

He wondered if those were the last jelly babies he'd ever taste, because he feared the reaction of the Time Lords when they received his report.

He sat cross-legged on the damp ground, the tails of his frock coat trailing over the rocky stone. He poured the little bottle of lighter fluid into the paper bag a few drops at a time, letting it soak through the fibres and spread.

The fumes hurt his head, but his head already hurt. Combat did that. He hated to fight. He hated how it made him feel; like how easy it would be to take over and take charge, to remove free will from the equation because he claimed to know better than others.

Humans. His bloody lip burned but he smiled anyway. Barbara would have been proud of him, wouldn't she? He'd learned her most important lessons simply by following her example.

* Let people rescue themselves; otherwise they'll never know if they can rescue themselves.

* Make small changes, slowly.

* Stay in the sidelines.

* Fight to defend; all else is a fight for its own sake.

* And when all else fails…hit the Dalek with the truck in fourth gear.

The little Time Lord paused and reached up, frowning at an odd sensation at his right eyebrow. His fingertips came away sticky. What a lack of surprise there.

Well, he'd get that cleaned up too. First things first, though…

The Doctor picked and poked at the heavy coating on the firecracker until the cap was prized off. He poured the powder charge into the bottom of the fuel-soaked bag, and gently shook the closed back until the interior was lightly coated all over.

Almost over.

He stood up, slowly. Every bone ached now. And he was very frightened for what would happen after this night.

The Time Lords wouldn't be angry with him for what he did. Oh, no.

They would be pleased with him.

Fulsome in their praise.

He didn't want their praise; they'd take this horror and imagine it meant he was becoming a proper Time Lord again, the way he'd been back when he was "respectable" and honored.

_I'm a pariah, exiled from Time Lord Society, so they can always deny sending me._

The hurt had never left, but he'd _thought_ he was coming to terms with it. Once in a while something would cause his personal loathing for the situation to rise up and take control of his perspective.

If the Time Lords had been more responsible and less "neutral" with other worlds, Dastari might never have hatched the insane plan to take him apart; his unholy experiment Chessene might never have tried to turn him into an Androgum, and the Sontarans would certainly have never helped.

"More responsible and less neutral" would have saved Miasmia Goria from the Rani. The memories of that poor, blistered-over planet still made him shiver.

He walked stiffly to the edge of the wood and tucked the improvised tinder into a deep shelter surrounded by the papery wisps of blue barkwood. His hands shook over the matches, but he struck fire on the first try.

The little Time Lord cupped the tiny flame inside his hands, letting it grow in strength, and painfully knelt, touching match to paper. A breath later he was stepping backwards, the gush of hot hair ruffling his hair away from his face.

The paper crumpled in on itself, and the wood caught. The Doctor took another step backwards, his hot, dry skin loosening as he re-entered the zone of cool, damp night air.

It was ridiculous how much he wished for the Brigadier's wisdom right now.

Jamie he needed for his warmth and sense of self but this…no. He didn't ever want Jamie to see this side of him.

But the Brigadier would know what he was feeling. And he'd understand.

Maybe he would be able to explain it to him.

Odd how that old soldier could surprise him with his strange wisdoms, but humans could be like that. Their strangest form of wisdom was in their refusal to see the Time Lords as Time Lords; they treated him as a powerful, resourceful friend, not a temporal God like so many other species.

A friend.

Time and Space, but he needed a friend right now.

_Crump._

Wood ignited into a burning tower of fire, violet from potassium nitrates native to the wood. It was a rare shade, and quite beautiful to the sight. And it was very, very hot. He winced at its heat against the still-swelling bruises on his skin, and clutched the heavy branch in his hands.

Yes, the Brigadier could explain this. Maybe he should look him up and see how he was doing…before his life came to its natural destiny in bed.

The little Time Lord accepted that most of the Universe saw him as a fool. It kept him alive—and it kept his friends alive (which was more important). But he did get tired of being treated like a fool. Sometimes it was a day to day struggle, and his otherselves really didn't help. They saw him not only a fool and a clown but an overly emotional one.

A loud, crackling sound skittered up from the middle of the bonfire. Oils from the ancient wood ignited and a strange, sweet perfume like juniper and fenugreek and nutmeg clouded his view of the stars.

The Doctor tilted his stiffening neck up to watch the clouds roll in oddly beautiful patterns across the clouds of the Andromeda Galaxy.

"So foolish," He murmured out loud, and wished he didn't feel so old and tired just now. Whilst he deserved it, he couldn't risk it. Old and tired people were a liability to themselves and to others, and his work was far from over.

"I am sorry." The Doctor said to the starry night. "I should have asked Napoleon for a funeral pyre. He would have granted you anything to commemorate your death. All I had to do was tell him you wanted a burial in fire. But I was too afraid of attracting notice. We'd already been noticed by too many people.

"We stopped the Players, but you died and your last words to me was "I finally did something." You didn't 'finally' do something. You saved an entire world, and that meant everything. You never had a chance to see the Universe. You died and I had you buried like a human and I had no idea the Rani was there the whole time!"

The smoke billowed. He pulled out his handkerchief and covered his nose and mouth with the cloth as the fire caught on the contents resting in the middle.

"Always hiding in the plain sight of war. Oh, how I wish I'd known. I _must_ have crossed paths with her before. I seem to always wind up in some sort of war when I come to Earth!" Despite the heat he stepped close and used his stick to push burning brands back into the flames.

"I chide myselves for their naivety, but I'm no better. I should have been more paranoid! But I wasn't. And because I wasn't, your remains were looted by one of the most evil geniuses of our world."

He blinked back the sting of smoke in his eyes, and wiped at them with the back of his coat sleeve. "I'm not sorry for how this ended, Serena. I know you'd be disappointed in me for falling into that trap of primitive emotions, but…I'm not sorry. She's done so many terrible things. She rendered her own planet a ruined cinder. I know. I was there. She enslaved the people and enslaved an incalculable number of humans for their neurochemicals, caused untold suffering, I can't even number the lives she's taken, and the souls she's damaged. You might argue you had no life to steal, but she was harvesting your body for her own ends, and her own ends were brilliant but never for good." He shivered, for the outcome had been close. "Ten more minutes and she would have cloned enough of your biodata that she could have broken into the Matrix on your genetic key. Ten minutes.

He winced slightly; the pyre was a fireball of all-consuming heat.

"I'm not going to let History repeat itself!" The Doctor said firmly. "Your ashes are already on their way home to your family. Now all I have to do is—" He stabbed at a crumbling log, shoving it back into the middle of the glow. "—make certain—no one will be able to—"…He grunted from the effort, but even though he was one of the smallest Doctors, he was still one of the strongest, and a heavy chunk of trunk collapsed on top of the body inside the flames. "—harvest her matter for the reasons why she harvested yours!" He shuddered from both effort and memory.

"That's not going to happen." The Doctor vowed.

And with that he stepped back into the cool night, holding vigil as the bonefire burned. He was over 900 years old now, though temporally trapped inside this body he usually never felt his age so much. But that seemed to happen when he took on a mission without his friends.

Not that he begrudged Jamie his time with his family, or Zoe and Victoria their lives. No, never that. But it frightened him that he'd come so close to death. No one would have known if the Rani had succeeded in her plans against him. It had been very, very close.

At heart he took no pleasure from what he was doing. It was another enemy defeated, another foe vanquished…another predator removed. But he felt old and tired and tomorrow there would be another enemy. Maybe it would be the Master—again. Or the Great Intelligence. Or another old friend turned sour.

But there would only be one Rani.

The Rani.

Ushas. Named after an obscure poet from the wilderness. On earth her name meant "Dawn" in Sanskrit. The greatest biochemist their school had ever seen.

And without a doubt, the most evil of minds; more so than even the Master, who was at least _capable_ of some compassion. She had lost that ability long ago...trading it in for rationalization and justifying the means with the ends in her centuries and centuries of slaughter.

They'd bonded briefly over the shared love of botany, but the differences in ethics split them apart just as quickly. It had always been her nature to cut a mystery apart until it was no more than a lump of molecules; he preferred to understand what he had, and cherish it for what it was: unique and therefore a treasure.

She would have taken _him_ apart, given the chance. Taken him apart, used his bioprint to pick the lock in the Matrix, and plundered the minds within.

She had always been smarter than he, but unlike the Master she never bothered with pointing out the inferior qualities of others unless they got in her way of scientific achievement.

He had been invited to her 94th birthday party. He had gone, flattered with their friendship and a little puzzled at how birthday parties happened. Other families celebrated them, but not his.

She'd given him his first time-piece; one of the small party tokens handed out casually to the guests. It didn't mean much to her; it was mechanical and thus less interesting, and anyway, a cheap thing.

He'd kept it until it fell apart. It was on him when he fled Gallifrey. It was centuries before anyone gave him another gift.

How ironic that it had been The Necronomicon; Jamie's innocent generosity at the machinations of the Master.

He remembered how beautiful she had been so easily, before the hard lines of obsession closed over her face and turned her eyes to flint.

He would always regret not asking her the one question he hadn't asked her when they graduated:

_"What are you afraid of, to pursue your answers with such zeal?"_

She wouldn't have answered. He knew this.

But he still wished he could have asked the question.


	2. Chapter 2

Because I was politely begged to expand on the background.

This is still a moody piece. The Second Doctor was often underestimated by friends and foe alike for his brazen, childish love of life, but his behavior models closely along those who grew up without having a childhood. Some people never learn what they've missed. I like to believe the Doctor is one of those rare, lucky people who overcome the emotional obstacles with growing up in an overly strict environment. Hartnell's Doctor grew over the course of his tenure from a cantankerous, reluctant and callous authoritarian to someone who learned to value friendship and companionship. This happened because he was traveling with humans-a species so young they would always be children to him.

Once his demeanor softened under the presence of humans, he changed forever. One of his last scenes show Hartnell at his uttermost heroic: frail, elderly, missing his teeth and nearing the end of his body, he joins in and argues with Polly against the Cybermen on the value of feelings-the very things his own people eschew save "in moderation" for fear they will be seen as weak and flawed.

And then, before we know it, he has collapsed upon the floor of the TARDIS. When he gets up again, it is as a younger man, a childlike man, his eyes re-opened to the wonders of the Universe.

After the stifling example of his people, the Doctor has learned the lesson of seeing with the eyes of a child. He will never un-learn this lesson again.

* * *

The entire planet is in chaos when he materializes.

For long minutes he simply stands halfway out of the TARDIS doorway, one hand hanging on the edge and stares at what had once been a fertile planet with long, feathery sweeps of violet-green grasses and yellow flowers. The planet is a rare one; partially sentient according to all the scans and tests, and the Temporal Committees had all agreed it should be left alone in order to develop naturally.

And develop it did: naturally and gently.

And then the Rani happened to Miasmia Goria.

There's not much sign of a fertile planet now. It's night and may be night for the next eighty years if the cloud cover keeps renewing itself from that smoking valley.

More smoke. He tips his head back, ruffling his untidy mop of thick hair as he overlooks a blurry row of smoking pillars. Factory after factory billows into poisonous gases through the stacks. They reflect sulphurous burnt-orange flames on the underbellies of clouds rendered heavy with toxic rain.

Even with the HADS switched off, the TARDIS refused to get any closer than this grassy knoll sheltered by the skeletons of dead trees.

The knoll, he notes with no small irony, is untouched because it is a graveyard.

Oh, it is irony. The living are killing each other, but the dead are sacrosanct.

He must be getting older, the Doctor thinks, because he's actually finding a scrap of comfort in this…he needs to know that there are some things people still find precious on this planet.

And with the horrific suffering before his eyes, he rationalizes that they may as well soothe their psychic wounds with the dead. The dead are beyond pain and suffering.

So many people believe. It's been his experience that that isn't the rule, but people need to believe in something. Even lies can lead to truth.

The little man huddles inside his overlarge, baggy coat and makes himself even smaller as he kneels beneath the largest tree. Years of chemical rain have turned this tree into mineral sculpture. With the first of nightfall's cold mist it weeps tiny calcium and boron pearls around him as he pulls the little oval-shaped disk out of one pocket and switches it on.

The face on the other side is stern and extremely imperious and impervious, her Royal Bara necklace gleaming deep lavender. That only happens when she's feeling distressed. He's still glad to see her.

"Report." She says simply.

"Karnak." He clears his throat. "I'm on the planet now." His eyes slip to the side and the awful hells below. "It…It is as bad as the reports say."

The face moves slightly, the strong mouth softens in a complicated blend of emotions. Even after all these years, he still never…quite…knows what she's thinking.

It's one of the things he likes about her. All his life people have said the same thing about him, but with her, he actually knows what it feels like.

"Be careful, Crius." The Agent uses her pet name for him when she is feeling very much worried. And she even looks worried now. He doesn't think she's pretending. "We'll stick to the plan for now. Go in but be cautious…" She takes a deep breath, and he hears it over the distant cries of fear and murder and anger. "Psychic status of the planet?"

"Still weak," The Doctor rubs at the back of his neck; his flesh is crawling. "But the whole planet's shifting. I can feel her through the soil. It's humming in the air. Like being in the Matrix if it were controlled by the mad."

"We'll have to Link," Karnak admits grudgingly. He appreciates her reluctance because it is for his sake. Her own people are warm and affectionate, easy with telepathic transference of thought and feeling. Time Lords—especially those of his breed—are nervous about letting others under their skin.

But he hasn't been much of a typical Time Lord; his in-the-trenches life as a renegade have amplified his normally latent Gallifreyan abilities to a higher level. He wishes this wasn't the reason why they paired him with Karnak. Royal Bara'tel yes, but her mother was one-quarter Offworlder before she was given Time Lady status. Even though Karnak was born after her mother was "blessed" with the Chameleon Arch, some of the snootier families still saw her as a mongrel breed.

Sometimes, the Doctor asked himself if Gallifrey had its periods of governance by racially judgmental fools just because it kept things from being boring. He really couldn't think of any other reason. His people loved their superiority so much, they parsed it to atoms, quarreled, and formed entire social feuds over it.

But they need her, and sadly, they need him too.

"All right." He hears himself saying. Rassilon, he hates telepathic links. Just the thought makes his already out-of-sync heartsbeat pound like a crazed child with bongo drums. "What level?" He hates asking, but she's the one in charge of this mission, not him.

"Just the first," she says quietly, knowing he's distressed at the thought of sharing minds with someone who is mandated to report him if she thinks he's out of line.

She'll probably report him anyway, he tells himself. He was bone-tired from his last mission over in the Vogon System when he got the summons-straight out of a much-needed nap. It's possible his response to the idiot on the other side of the screen could be seen as rude and hasty...assuming they had a dictionary to look up some of the words...

Something knocks politely at his Pineal Gland: Karnak being mannerly.

He closes his eyes and takes a deep, restorative breath, clearing his thoughts. Between his mind and hers a thread of psychic kenning spins. It's thinner than a spider's web but that's all they need. When he opens his eyes he knows she's watching the world through them as well. Probably even smelling the same, poisoned air.

(Ready?) She asks.

He nods. "No time like the present." He says grimly.

* * *

It takes over six hours to get to the heart of the falling city. It takes cunning and guile to get through the shattered streets, ruined buildings and the swarms of crazed survivors. They can't see him in his Concealment Cloak, but that doesn't protect him against stray missiles, or explosions, shrapnel, the sporadic blitzkrieg of burning rubble hailing from above…or worst of all, the massive buildups of atmospheric static that discharge in the form of lightning bolts.

Saddest of all are the proofs that the planet's sentience is damaged and possibly beyond repair. The people would have never caused harm to their beloved world, their home, their Goddess/God, their Mother/Father. He sees monuments to the rift in broken rocks, exploded cliff-faces that housed the elaborate living stone chambers. And the bodies left to desiccate in the poisoned air.

"I felt safer when I was in the Death Zone," he complains once as he gets into the nook of a crumbled-up alleyway just in time. It's the lightning; it reminds him all too well of how that would come out of nowhere in the Death Zone.

(How often were you in the Death Zone?) Karnak asks him with a shade of amusement behind her concern.

"Oh, dear. Officially or un-officially?" He huddles up as the charge slowly grounds itself out. The ruined air stinks of ozone, and his hair is trying to stand on end and dance a tango.

In the old days he wouldn't even have come within a hundred trillion miles of Miasimia Goria. The Rani was as much of a renegade as he was back then—but a renegade is a renegade, and most of them would have turned him in for a little leverage or power with Gallifrey.

In the Rani's case he wouldn't have worried about _her_ turning him in. She was much more likely to slice apart anything that struck her fancy, and her sharkish tendencies had no concept of ethics. Everything and anything was just a potential experiment or a living petri dish for some awful biological game.

No. If she'd caught him here…he's 200% certain he would have wound up on the wrong side of her examination table. And the Jade Dreamers only knew what she would have done to him then! Besides keep him alive as long as possible. She could never resist the allure of exotic specimens, and her own people were the rarest experimental subjects of all. She'd make the one last as well as she could. He shivered under his coat, chilled to the bone at an all-too-plausible prospect.

These people had been under the Rani's complete rule. Poor things. He doubts they could recognize themselves after this point. She's tampered with their bodies, their minds, their very souls. It was the mind-tampering that enhanced their abilities to the point they could generate telekenisis with their psychic draw upon the rare crystals of the earth itself…but that experiment went sour as that portion of the brain needed sleep to replenish. She'd taken that away and they'd gotten violent. Then she went to Earth and started harvesting the neurochemical serum for sleep from human brains.

…and then the humans turned violent as well.

The mathematics of this problem are astronomical. What the Rani had removed from one human wasn't enough for even one of the Gorians; it took about twenty humans to create one successful treatment.

(How is it your future self learnt of the Rani's atrocities in the first place?) Karnak wondered.

"You know how it goes," he sighs. "Run into yourself here, run in there, meet yourself coming and going…before long you find you're both in the Matrix at the same time…"

(Oh. Oh, that does complicate things.) Karnaks' mind-voice is genuine in its pity. He doesn't mind it from her; she's honest about her feelings. Just like Jamie.

It is not only illegal and immoral to jump forward in your timestream, it is considered Bad Form. Rude. Socially humiliating. About as outré and embarrassing as having an unfortunate accident that compels you to regenerate in public.

On the other hand, accidents happen, and they happen a lot.

If you asked his Keepers at the CIA, they would posit he was nothing but one unfortunate accident after another; a chain of regrettable events that was better off kept on a short leash in order to prevent further fallout from the disastrous consequences of his freedom.

As if to underscore their bitter truth, a shelled-out building on the other side of the street implodes. He has time to dive behind a broken chunk of stone roof as Karnak shrieks her alarm in his mind. By the time the air clears of its fresh wave of dust and his ears quit ringing, he can sense they're both shaking.

(Let's try to finish this, Clius,) She advises with a mind-voice gone thin with strain. (But first I think you should try to get some sleep.)

"There's no time to sleep! Or even a decent place," he adds just as a building crumbles to sand on the other side of the valley. Its death-throes barely ripple the scarred earth. The black slime clogging the canals only bubbles once.

(You're safe enough where you are. It's a shrine of some sort.)

He twists his head backwards and finds himself looking eye to cross-eyed eye with a stone gargoyle of sort, its jaws neatly and delicately holding the heart of a penitent on its way to the Afterlife. If the heart was evil the Dead-walker would swallow it, but if it was pure it would be carried to its loved ones on the other side. The Doctor gulps at the not-subtle imagery.

"I'm not sure I can sleep with that over my head!"

(I'll keep watch, Crius.) Karnak is being VERY patient. She lets him know this, especially when he's being skittish. (They brought you in cold and you didn't have time to recover. One would think they thought you were only two hundred years old or something.)

"Or something." He says uneasily, but the offer to sleep while someone watches is a tempting one. He settles against the rubble under the Shrine, reassured that it's as safe as anything else here.

Silence. They both listen to the sounds of anarchy in the distance. On the other side of the web-thread of the mind, Karnak is seated in her office, a Pythian bowl lit to aid her concentration. He envies the calm, cool order of her thoughts. She's so self-aware. He used to think he was that way, once.

"I don't know how I can get into that wretched lab without being seen," He snaps crossly. "It's _the Rani,_ Karnak! You know she's got enough booby-traps from here to her office to baffle a Dalek!"

(We'll just have to be careful. I've got your bioprints on a solid lock. If it gets truly bad I'll risk pulling you out.)

"It's already bad enough," he whispers. In the distance there is wailing, high-pitched and pure as an entire world continues its slide into madness.


End file.
